Official Prop. 8 Plaintiffs Statement on Today’s Stay Ruling
The Chief Judge of the United States District Court for the Northern District of California, who last week rendered a sweeping decision striking down California’s Proposition 8 as an unconstitutional violation of the rights of gay and lesbian citizens to due process and equal protection of the law under the Fourteenth Amendment, today denied the proponents’ motion to stay that decision pending a full resolution of the merits on appeal, instead granting only a short stay until August 18, 2010 “solely in order to permit the court of appeals to consider the issue in an orderly manner.” This means that unless the Court’s decision is stayed by a higher court, Californians who were denied equality by Proposition 8 will soon, and once again, enjoy their fundamental right to marry. Today’s order can be found here:
“The overwhelming evidence at trial established beyond any doubt that Proposition 8 denies gay men and lesbians the fundamental right to marry and treats them unequally, without any rational basis for doing so, and that it causes them irreparable and immediate harm,” said Theodore B. Olson, who together with David Boies led the legal team in this lawsuit. “The Court’s decision today recognizes that there is no reason to delay allowing gay men and lesbians to enjoy the same rights that virtually all other citizens already enjoy.”
“The unconstitutionality of Proposition 8 is comprehensively and unequivocally demonstrated by the Court’s 136-page ruling, and so we are confident that we will continue to prevail,” said Chad Griffin, the Board President of the American Foundation for Equal Rights. “Our nation was founded on the principle that every American is equal in the eyes of the law. This case is about affirming that principle.”
The American Foundation for Equal Rights and plaintiffs Kris Perry, Sandy Stier, Paul Katami and Jeff Zarrillo challenged Proposition 8 in federal court for violating the U.S. Constitution. After a three-week trial (including the testimony of 17 plaintiffs’ witnesses, among them the foremost experts on the relevant issues, and thousands of pages of documents and a wealth of other evidence) the Court ruled last Wednesday, August 4, that Proposition 8 violated the rights to equal protection under the law and due process that the U.S. Constitution guarantees to every American.
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